As the old saying goes, when it rains it pours. NVIDIA
was performing beautifully thanks to aggressive pricing and performance of its
8000 series of graphics cards. It looked poised to leave competitor AMD
(formerly ATI) in the dust. However, the latest
round in graphics war has marked a dramatic turnaround with AMD's
4850 and 4870 outperforming NVIDIA's offerings at
a lower price.

That was not the end of the bad news from NVIDIA either. It announced
that it was facing a massive recall, due to overheating GPUs in notebook
computers. NVIDIA reported higher than average failures in both the
laptop GPUs and in laptop chipsets.

NVIDIA said that the chips and their packaging were made with materials that
proved to be too "weak". NVIDIA passes the blame to notebook
manufacturers, which it says contributes to the problem. Typically
notebooks have poorer ventilation and components concentrated in a smaller
space than desktop computers.

The result of the recalls is that NVIDIA will be taking a onetime charge of
$150M USD to $200M USD to cover the damages. It plans to use the money to
repair or replace defective parts. It also hopes to collect part of the
money from insurers it uses. However, it has acknowledged its problems
and switched the materials it uses.

The news has resulted in NVIDIA taking a beating on the stock market, sliding over
25 percent.

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

The author of the Daily Tech must have copied that quote from somewhere else and never bothered to look at the original announcement on the nVidia web-site.

Here is the actual text of the statement from nV's CEO in the nVidia public announcement.

quote: Regarding the notebook field failures, NVIDIA president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang stated:-"Although the failure appears related to the combination of the interaction between the chip material set and system design, we have a responsibility to our customers and will take our part in resolving this problem. The GPU has become an increasingly important part of the computing experience and we are seeing more interest by PC OEMs to adopt GPUs in more platforms. Recognizing that the GPU is one of the most complex processors in the system, it is critical that we now work more closely with notebook system designers and our chip foundries to ensure that the GPU and the system are designed collaboratively for the best performance and robustness "

And he also said:-

quote: This has been a challenging experience for us. However, the lessons we've learned will help us build far more robust products in the future, and become a more valuable system design partner to our customers. As for the present, we have switched production to a more robust die/package material set and are working proactively with our OEM partners to develop system management software that will provide better thermal management to the GPU

Seems as if there is considerable "mea culpa" from Jen-Hsun here and only a little finger-pointing at the notebook manufacturers..... Considering the danger to one's reproductive capabilities that many high-performance laptops/notebooks exhibit, I personally think that placing at least some responsibility on the system manufacturers for adequate system-cooling is quite justified....